The humanity test: do these people deserve €350 a week?

'Did you think there was a scandal in the fact that some poorly paid workers were better off or did you think that the scandal lay in the realisation that these people are being paid so little anyway?' (stock photo)

'Did you think there was a scandal in the fact that some poorly paid workers were better off or did you think that the scandal lay in the realisation that these people are being paid so little anyway?' (stock photo)

It was the ultimate test of where you stand on the great issues of economics and society: when you found out that a few people on the €350-a-week Covid payment were actually getting more than they would for working, did you think this was a good or a bad thing?

Did you think there was a scandal in the fact that some poorly paid workers were better off, perhaps moving the few extra bob to their offshore accounts?

Or did you think that the scandal lay in the realisation that these people are being paid so little anyway?

The latter is, of course, the correct answer - but it was worth it for the insight it gave us into the way that the top people think. And the things that they worry about, at dead of night.

I mean, they really do worry that something went terribly wrong here - to have these poor people getting too much. Just as they used to worry after the Great Crash that at €500,000 a year, the bank bosses were getting too little.

They really used to worry that for half-a-million a year you just weren't going to get the talent you need at the highest level of the game.

Not for them the broader perspective you might get, when you consider that the person working for less than €350 a week just got a break of the ball - for once in their lives. And that they can't even enjoy it for a few minutes without hearing that they'll be pursued to the ends of the earth for this. Run down like dogs.

So if we're going to make one resolution, let it be this: in the fullness of time, if anyone is miserable enough to be making a federal case out of this, they should be scorned mercilessly and run out of public life.

On full pension, of course.

*******

As he walked down the 18th fairway at Congressional, a winner of the 2011 US Open, Rory McIlroy declined to wave the Tricolour offered to him because… because it's complicated.

At that moment I felt that his instinctive rejection of the ancient lure of eejitry was profoundly impressive.

Sure enough, his recent refusal of an invitation to play in Saudi Arabia, and his criticism of Trump the other week, have confirmed the highest hopes we had for the man - especially since he seemed to have lost his way for a while, by playing golf with Trump in the first place. And you may say that being a fantastically rich golfer gives him a certain freedom to choose his playing partners, as it were, but strangely enough this doesn't stop most of the other fantastically rich golfers from being Trump-loving creatures of the corporate night.

Anyone can be a genius, it's the luck of the draw. But Rory seems to have a soul too, and that has made all the difference.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​